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Welcome to this week's Symfony Station Communique. It’s your weekly review of the most valuable and essential news in the Symfony and PHP development communities. This week it’s pretty extensive, so take your time and peruse it for the most valuable items.

Thanks to Javier Eguiluz and Symfony for sharing our last communique in their Week of Symfony.

Please note all links will open in a new browser window. My opinions, if I present any, will be in bold.

Symfony

This week

As always, we will start with the official news from Symfony.

Highlight -> “This week, Symfony 5.4.0-BETA1 and 6.0.0-BETA1 versions were published in preparation for their final release at the end of November 2021. We also published the first articles about the new features of Symfony 5.4. Lastly, we announced more speakers for the SymfonyWorld Online 2021 Winter Edition conference (December 9-10, 2021). ”

A Week of Symfony #775 (1-7 November 2021)

Javier has a series of posts on what’s new in Symfony 5.4.

New in Symfony 5.4: Nested Validation Attributes

New in Symfony 5.4: Controller Changes

New in Symfony 5.4: Route Aliasing

New in Symfony 5.4: PHP Enumerations Support

Would you like to put your brand ahead of the Symfony community? Make your Corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy a reality? The Fast-Track book for version 6 and SymfonyWorld Online conference next month are still open for sponsorship!

But in this blog post, Nicolas Grekas makes a specific call to SaaS providers for whom Symfony has a bridge (aka plugins).

Calling SaaS providers to back their Symfony bridge

SensioLabs, the company behind Symfony, has some great resources for getting the best out of your projects.

Read / Watch / Download / Enjoy our free resources

Featured Item

We continue to highlight the most significant post of the week.

Makeoverarena says: “Although there are many PHP frameworks, Laravel and Symfony are the most popular. Hence, there has been a constant rivalry between both. Especially on which one to choose in the coming year (2022). So, if you are in the dark about the one to choose, it isn’t hard. Just pay attention to this article as its main purpose is to explain the best out of both.”

Laravel Vs. Symfony – Which PHP Framework to Choose in 2022?

Here is another comparison.

How Laravel Differs From Symfony?

Via SymfonyCasts: “If your app checks passwords, implementing the new PasswordAuthenticatedUserInterface is for you! How do you check if the submitted password is valid from inside an authenticator? You don't! Instead, you attach the new PasswordCredentials object to your Passport... and let Symfony do the heavy lifting for you!”

This week on SymfonyCasts

Wouter Carabain, who provides some helpful info on his new blog, continues a new series of posts looking at pairing Symfony with API Platform. Here’s the third one and a follow-up of the articles we shared in earlier communiques.

How to create a simple application using Symfony and React Native – Part 3

Anders Björkland has a second article on Bolt CMS. The previous one dealt with content creation and editing. This one looks at how to implement a design for it.

Bolt CMS for designers

Drupal users, Drupal needs your input. The decision was made to create a "test" branch with Symfony 5.4. The question now is how are they going to do that. A couple of choices must be made. Tell them what you think!

[POLICY] Release Symfony 5.4 with which Drupal branch and how much support will it get?

On a similar note Drupal 10’s rollout is dictated by Symfony 6’s.

What To Expect from Drupal 10, and How to Deal With Drupal 8’s End of Life

The API Platform Conference made their presentations available for replay. Several caught my eye.

In French. Why Symfony and PHP are still in the game for any project.

A suitable serialization with API Platform and Symfony

In English. Sylius and API Platform: the story of integration

Symfony Runtime: wrapping API Platform in a lambda

In this post, Mickaël Andrieu asks how to control the quality of your PHP and Symfony projects? In French.

Comment contrôler la qualité de vos projets PHP & Symfony?

He also posted this one.

Contrôler la qualité de vos projets PHP & Symfony avec PHP-CS-Fixer

And Mickaël finishes with the series with this one.

Contrôler la qualité de vos projets PHP & Symfony à l’aide des hooks Git

This article is from an unlikely source and, despite its title, is more about the history and advantages of SensioLabs and Symfony. But it’s still interesting.

Migrating from Legacy to Symfony? SensioLabs explains it all!

Romain writes Github Actions will help you guarantee optimal quality and good functioning of code thanks launching of automatic tests. But it also warns you about the known vulnerabilities of your dependencies.

Github Actions for Symfony 5, PHPUnit, and more

Timeless

I ran across Akashic Seer’s blog last week, which is a treasure chest of Symfony-related posts. Here are a few posts from his archive.

Symfony 5+ check if user is logged in inside a twig template

How to install and configure Redis in Symfony 5+ for local testing

PHP

This week

Our “frenemies” at Laravel have this helpful video for your enjoyment.

Getting Started With PHP in 2022

Mateusz Cholewka says that you should manage your logs if you are using Docker and cloud services to run your application live.

How to configure PHP logs for Docker

Sticher.io notes that PHP 8.1 will be released on November 25, 2021. We already know all the new features, performance improvements, changes, and deprecations, so let's go through them one by one.

What's new in PHP 8.1

Brent also had this article.

PHP 8.1 in 8 code blocks

And this video.

Generics in PHP (video)

In another video, Kinsta shows us:

How to install PHP on any server

Beau Beauchamp tells us why PHP is more popular and more hated than ever.

I thought about going with this one for the featured post.

PHP Is Killing Python

And we still get these kinds of articles generated from “data” from “a survey by”.

Is PHP Doomed to Decline in the Long Term? TIOBE Thinks So.

And yet another comparison article, this time for Node.JS.

PHP vs. Node.js: Which is Better for Backend Development?

Starting your journey as a PHP developer? Here are some of the best PHP Projects to inspire you.

10+ The Best PHP Projects GitHub 2022

Type variance allows types to change during inheritance in a way that is compatible with the Liskov substitution principle. This article describes how this works on a technical level.

Type variance in PHP

Last Week

Smaine Milianni states “Le but de cet article est de donner une vue d’avion sur ce qu’est l’architecture hexagonale et de faire un retour d’expérience sur son utilisation dans un contexte professionnel.”

L’archi Hexa est-ce archi bien? Is hexagonal architecture good architecture?

Timeless

In a post from last year, JetBrains notes the Pest PhpStorm plugin is a new addition to PhpStorm’s growing ecosystem. With this plugin, testing your code in your favorite IDE is even simpler and faster!

How the Pest PhpStorm Plugin Will Improve Your Testing Workflow

In a similar vein, Laravel News says Better PHPUnit is a Visual Studio Code plugin by Caleb Porzio for running PHPUnit tests from the editor. Like Sublime PHPUnit, it automates running repetitive PHPUnit commands using the command palette or keyboard shortcuts.

Better PHPUnit VS Code Extension

Other

In the Guardian, Jane Martinson writes, “I have been at the Web Summit in Portugal, a sort of Davos for the technology industry, which ended with the sense that after years of talk about harm and regulation, the demands are increasing, and change is finally in the air.

While it is true that most of the 40,000 startup founders, investors, and other attendees still yearn to be the next $7tn company like Meta, there was also genuine discussion about the kind of tech and the kind of society that discovers children are being harmed, and democracies undermined and yet does little or nothing about it.”

Mark Zuckerberg and the tech bros are still on top – but their grip is loosening

Burke Holland says: “One of the first things you realize after getting started with GitHub’sCodespaces, is that you desperately want your custom environment setup that you enjoy locally to somehow magically be available in Codespaces. You can do that using a “dotfiles” repo, and in this post, we’re going to look at how to set up a dotfiles repo and what quirks you need to be aware of to use it with Codespaces.

How to add your dotfiles to GitHub Codespaces

Travis Weston notes that: “one of the first lessons you learn when getting into business is that there are two types of debt: Good debt and bad debt. Technical debt is no different. We’ll never avoid technical debt entirely, but we can prevent bad technical debt.”

The (Technical) Debt Snowball: Pay down technical debt without going bankrupt in the process.

I learned a lot about edge servers from this post by Kinsta.

How Do Edge Servers Work? Everything You Need to Know

Docker has the details on Docker Desktop 4.2 and its expanded capabilities.

Docker Desktop 4.2 Release: Save Your Battery with Pause / Resume, and Say Goodbye to the Update Pop-up

Have you published or seen something related to Symfony or PHP that we missed? If so, please contact us.

That's it for this week. Thanks for making it to the end of another extended edition. ;) I look forward to sharing next week's Symfony and PHP news with you on Friday.

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Happy coding Symfonistas!

Reuben Walker
Founder Symfony Station
Reuben is also Ringmaster of Mobile Atom Media and its division Mobile Atom Code.